: According to Matt Soell in his weekly Halo update Halo will have "seven
: or eight thousand distinct lines of combat dialog (that doesn't include
: speech outside of combat, such as the dialog in cutscenes), which works
: out to roughly 160 phrases per AI unit." It looks like this will be
: the main way Halo's story will be revealed to the player. If so it makes
: creating a Halo's Story page alot more difficult. Who's up for a bit of
: transcribing? We may even need some QDA software as well.
After reading that bit, I was more under the impression that Matt was refering to phrases to be pronounced in battle situations (e.g. "Retreat!", "I'm out of ammo!", "Hm, so, do you guys speak English?" etc.), and not anything related to communicating the storyline.
On the other hand, I presume we'll still have to deal with spoken dialogue. But there'll probably be an option to show subtitles, at least for important/storyline-related stuff, which means that the actual text will reside somewhere in the game's data files. So I don't think it'll be too long before someone comes up with a utility to extract the subtitles.
-Heady
